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In 1986 and 1987, a young dude in Massachusetts played bass in a band that was making some noise in independent music circles. And while his position was enviable for someone of his age (he turned 21 during this stretch), he was already feeling some insecurity about his role in the group. The band was called Dinosaur, and they were led by a savant guitarist and songwriter named J Mascis; the bassist was a kid named Lou Barlow who had more to say musically than this band would allow him. And so, building on the weird acoustic song called "Poledo" that he'd been allowed on the band's second album, You're Living All Over Me, he began recording at home in earnest. Where Dinosaur were known for their blown-out guitar energy, Barlow's solo project, which he called Sentriodoh, was quiet, a conversation spoken in a whisper. Here and there, his friend Eric Gaffney helped out on percussion, but the focus on these early recordings was squarely on Barlow's voice, his brief tunes, and the steady strumming of his guitar and ukulele. He put out a Sentridoh cassette in 1987 in a tiny run and called it Weed Forestin'.

As luck would have it, Barlow had the perfect voice-- chesty and reasonably deep but always on pitch-- and songwriting style for this kind of music. He sounded like someone who'd lived a while and seen some things even though he really hadn't, but his naivety and inexperience turned out to be an advantage. Performing his songs for his four-track, he sounded utterly alone, and the tunes took on a diaristic feel. He sang about being lonely and jerking off and feeling unloved, but he also had a sense of humor and was able to laugh at himself. Many of the songs were just sketches-- there were 23 of them in 45 minutes-- but they never felt incomplete, exactly. It was more that, when Barlow had said what needed to be said and introduced his melodic or lyrical idea, he was cool with just stopping and moving on to something else. This music was more about process than resolution.

Barlow now brings the original vision of Weed Forestin' back into print. It's an album with a strange release history. After those initial cassettes, which were issued in two editions as Barlow added more songs to them, the album was eventually reissued by Homestead on vinyl. By then, however, they came out under the name Sebadoh, the one used by Barlow when in full collaboration with Gaffney (he'd continue to release solo material as Sentridoh). Eventually, Weed Forestin' was combined with an edited version of its Sebadoh follow-up, The Freed Man, and was released on CD in 1990 as The Freed Weed. I'm going to guess that this is the version through which almost everyone who heard these songs in the 90s first encountered them (including yours truly). But this set brings Weed Forestin' back to its initial form, under the Sentridoh name. It comes in multiple editions, including deluxe vinyl (I worked from mp3 promos for this review), and comes with an hour of bonus material called Child of the Apocalypse, which adds early versions, alternate takes, and unreleased songs.

It's worth asking whether a 25-year-old album of home-recorded indie folk is worth reissuing at all. This is, in one respect, music very much of its time, when small-run print zines were the only source of information about this low-key and obscure music, and the independent scene was still very much in the underground. Does Weed Forestin' have anything special to say in 2012 that isn't being said by the thousands of home-recording kids currently on the cusp of turning 21?

It's not an easy question to answer, and, since I encountered this music in the 90s and it opened my ears to a new way of listening to and thinking about music, I may not be the right person to ask. But to my ears, Weed Forestin' holds up very well, and represents a sort of ideal for what a home-recorded singer-songwriter record might be. For one, there's the sheer tunefulness of Barlow's songwriting. Even though he was writing fragments, songs like "New Worship", "Gate to Hell", and "Brand New Love" are filled with fresh melodic turns you don't quite expect and chord changes that lodge in your brain (later covers of some of these tunes would bear out their strength as compositions). Hearing this stuff at the time, Barlow came over like a suburban Nick Drake remaking Pink Moon in his bedroom (which made even more sense when Sebadoh eventually covered "Pink Moon" on Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock). And Weed Forestin' could also be seen as a young dude's version of Joni Mitchell's Blue, another record Barlow came to admire, talking about self-doubt and his place in the world around him and in the simplest and most direct terms.

And the structure of Weed Forestin' elevates it further. It's sequenced to flow, with garbled tape pieces, swells of sampled symphonic music, and even a snippet of Eric Burdon and the Animals' "Sky Pilot" to keep it moving along. It works an appealing edge between a collage and a proper album, and has the feel of a mixtape. Part of the allure of home recording of this kind, which continues to this day, is the blurring of the lines between listening to music and making it. Barlow arranged everything to give it a sense of context that made the completed project feel whole.

All of which explains why the copious bonus material is even more for-fans-only than is typical for this kind of release. We're talking about extras here, for a 23-song album of bits and pieces. And since the assembly of Weed Forestin' proper feels anything but random, the dump of additional material doesn't add a whole lot. There are reasonably interesting tape collages and instrumental and alternate versions of some of the album's better-known songs, but they're not the sort of thing anyone but the most dedicated fans would return to. I'm glad they exist and are available, and it makes perfect sense to include them here, but Weed Forestin' on its own is more than enough.

The first question people ask with lo-fi is whether it's a necessity or an aesthetic choice. For every artist saying, "If I could afford a real studio, I'd use one," there's another talking about the warmth and intimacy of the four-track cassette (or, more recently, the cheap microphone, cracked recording software, and reasonably expensive computer). People who've no choice but to record on inexpensive equipment carry with them an air of purity: They're presumably poor artists who, for one reason or another, are not given access to the means of production (think Daniel Johnston bouncing between dictaphone cassette machines in his brother's garage). Whereas producers making lo-fi by choice aestheticize the the warp, the break, and the hiss. Since we know that cheap recordings can mask mistakes, a certain amount of skepticism for those in the latter group is natural and healthy. But you're eventually confronted with a piece of music that either does something for you or doesn't. For me, modest as it is, Weed Forestin' still works wonders.